CT Horrorfest 2019 Wrap-up

Your humble publisher manning the SWC booth. Photo by Frank Roman.

This past Saturday, the StarWarp Concepts crew rolled into the Naugatuck Event Center (located in Naugatuck, Connecticut) for the sixth annual Connecticut Horrorfest. So, how’d it go? Read on!

Even before the show opened we had a visitor: artist Frank Romano, who for more than thirty years was the art director of Ben Cooper Inc. If you were a kid trick-or-treating in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, odds are good you were wearing one of those memorable Ben Cooper Halloween costumes, and Mr. Romano didn’t just design costumes and masks (that’s his devil-costume painting you see here), his art also appeared on the boxes. He was there to promote Halloween In a Box, a new documentary about the Ben Cooper days, and he said he had to stop by just to tell us how much he liked the Bob Larkin artwork on the Pandora Zwieback banner. Thanks again, Mr. Romano!

Jeff Homan and Benjamin Bartlett, creators of the comic book The Toking Dead, also stopped by to chat a little about convention experiences and hiring comic artists. To quote their promo material, The Toking Dead is about “two friends who open a dispensary after the legalization of medicinal marijuana was approved. A catastrophic event at a nearby facility flipped their world upside down when people began to turn into crazed, undead mutants. Duke and Tobi accidentally discover that their weed has a strange and unique effect on the zombies. The need for flesh has been replaced with a need for weed, and maybe a Twinkie or two. Follow their story as they try to save the world.” Good luck and continued success with the series, guys!

On the money side of things, sales were…okay, but dropped off about halfway through the afternoon. The biggest seller was The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual #1, but that wasn’t too surprising: it’s a color comic book, the art looks great, the story is intriguing, it’s a separate adventure from the novels, and at conventions I sell it at a discount. Lorelei: Sects and the City was a close second—graphic novel, good story and art, discounted price. I see a pattern forming…

Sales at the show itself might have been sluggish, but hopefully all the folks who asked if they could order our titles from our website, or from Amazon, will result in some post-con sales. That’s what the Internet was created for, isn’t it?

However, it turns out that if you want to make real money at a horror show you need to be a professional ghostbuster, as evidenced by the crowds that kept forming all day long directly across the aisle from us, at the booth of Jason McLeod, self-described “paranormal investigator, demonologist, spiritualist, and empath.” It certainly helped that he’d had a working relationship with the late Ed and Lorraine Warren, whose ghost-hunting adventures were the basis of what has become known as New Line Cinema’s “Conjuring Universe” (The Conjuring, Annabelle, The Nun, The Curse of La Llorona).

Yup, there’s definitely money to be made in ghost-breaking…

Overall, though, the folks at CT Horrorfest definitely impressed us with how well they run a show, and the huge turnout of enthusiastic horror fans was a major plus. But hey, when you’ve got Pinhead from Hellrariser, Jigsaw from Saw, and the American Werewolf in London as headliners, people are gonna show up. We picked up some new fans—including a few budding writers whose ears I bent as I gave them advice on how to hone their craft (I can’t help it; it’s the editor in me)—and got folks interested in SWC, so it all sort of worked out in the end.

Thanks for the good time, CT Horrorfest!